


Scrap Metal

by halloweenjack21st



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Child Neglect, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Gen, Implied Violence, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-23 04:40:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9641105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halloweenjack21st/pseuds/halloweenjack21st
Summary: Alternate history where Seska lives past the events of "Basics" and is also half-Bajoran. She is interviewed by B'Elanna Torres to see if she deserves to be reintegrated into the crew, and discloses a lot about her early life and training by the Obsidian Order. TW: childhood sexual abuse, neglect, self-harm, implied violence. Seska did not have a happy childhood in this version.





	

Scrap Metal

B'Elanna walked toward the brig, feeling her resentment growing at every step. She already had plenty to do without this pointless and irritating distraction; the Kazon hadn't left the ship in great shape, and Engineering was no exception. Looking at some of the attempted modifications around the warp core, she'd started to believe that a major source of mortality among the sects may have been their killing themselves trying to tamper with technology that they neither understood nor could adequately repair on their own. Plus, of course, the person whom she was going to see hadn't seemed to have aided them or prevented them from doing serious damage. That just made her little errand that much worse. 

She should really be mad at Janeway, B'Elanna thought as she arrived and the guards double-checked her visit with Tuvok. There was no real reason for her to try talking to the traitor; B'Elanna wouldn't trust her to unclog the waste extraction system, let alone come back to Engineering or do anything else involving a higher level of tech than a plunger. If Janeway didn't want to simply throw the turncoat out of the nearest airlock, she could put her on the nearest neutral planet and let her apply her tech knowledge to survival. If she wanted to be the Queen of the Delta Quadrant that badly, she could stay here. However, Janeway didn't quite see it that way. She was insistent that the Cardassians were potential allies of the Federation and relationships were normalizing with them--and never mind that they had tried to railroad a Starfleet engineer in one of their "trials" on charges that he was working with the Maquis, just before they got yanked to the Delta Quadrant--and that there was some plausibility to the prisoner's claim that she had pretended to support the Kazon-Nistrim in order to prevent them from capturing Voyager and using its advanced tech to take over the other sects. The captain expressed her own skepticism at this, but said that she was trying to cover all the bases before putting the prisoner under permanent confinement to quarters. So, never mind repairing damaged relays and plasma conduits; the chief engineer of the ship was supposed to play interrogator. A great use of her time, to be sure.

B'Elanna didn't know what she'd find when she walked into the brig and was given a seat in front of the cell's force field, but it wasn't the prisoner stretched out on her bunk, hands loosely clasped in front of her and her hair laying loose across the pillow, looking for all the world like a corpse laid out for public viewing. She stifled a greeting and peered more closely. Was she even breathing? It wasn't impossible that she'd smuggled in some sort of poison; after all, she was probably an Obsidian Order agent, and operatives of intelligence services were known to prefer death to capture--

"Think that I'm dead, Torres?" B'Elanna stifled a gasp, but the prisoner still chuckled and opened her eyes. "Hardly. I haven't slept this well in ages, though. Maje Culluh was quite... persistent in his affections, and the diet didn't helped much--the Kazon have difficulty cooking food that even they find palatable." She finally glanced over at the engineer. "How's life been treating you?"

"Just fine, no thanks to you, Seska." B'Elanna had recovered quickly and was giving her former friend her best flat stare. "I should have known that you'd practically wreck the core, trying to take care of it yourself." 

Seska snorted. "You think they left me alone there, or even in charge? Culluh may have, well, enjoyed me physically, but don't think that he'd ever really trust me with the ship's systems, or at least not alone with them. He'd let me go down to Engineering just often enough to see the mess that they'd made and try to suggest what they should really be doing, but no way was he going to trust me with my own crew, and they may not have taken orders directly from me anyway. Not sure that I wanted to be alone with them, to be honest. More than a few of them wanted to be Maje, or at least enjoy the Maje's privileges." Seska suddenly sat up and sat cross-legged on the bunk. She tented her fingers and looked up at B'Elanna. "So, to what do I owe the pleasure? Are you missing a hyperspanner or something?"

B'Elanna sighed. "I wouldn't expect it back, at least in usable condition. No, the captain wants me to talk to you to see if there's anything salvageable behind that lying face of yours, if there was any reason to let you rejoin the crew." She looked at the prisoner, who gazed back calmly. "You can probably imagine how I reacted to that." 

"I imagine that you've thought of grabbing my hair and slamming my face against the wall until nobody could tell if I was Cardassian, Bajoran, or a Horta in a wig." Still with that serene expression that made B'Elanna briefly imagine doing just that. "Let me just cut to the chase. I won't beg you for forgiveness or try to make you feel bad for telling Janeway that it's out of the question, and I doubt that, even if the guard were sympathetic to your desire for revenge, she'd let you in to do what you really want to do." Seska paused. "I've got a pretty good scan of myself in the holodeck files, if you want to use your holodeck time to beat me to a pulp. I'd understand." 

"Really, Seska. You expect me to believe that you'd be OK with me just walking out of here right now and telling the captain 'no way'?" B'Elanna snorted. "You spend enough time in here or in a stripped-bare room without anything to occupy your time but whatever books or vids the captain will allow you to have, no tech to play with or anything, your finely-honed spy mind will turn to mush. How long before you find a way to kill yourself?"

"If that were at all the way I would go, I'd have done it already," Seska replied. "And no one would be able to stop or revive me. Believe me, I've been in worse places. Believe me." Her calm gaze flattened out a bit and she looked at B'Elanna blankly; the engineer felt a chill and wondered if this was Seska's interrigator face. 

"Do tell." 

"Do you really want to know?"

"Why not? It'll kill some time and I can tell Janeway that I tried." 

"All right." Seska looked down for a moment, then back up. "First of all, I'm not a full-blood Cardassian." 

"I'd wondered why you hadn't gone back all the way to your original appearance." 

"I'd never looked like a regular Cardassian. A decent surgeon could make me look that way--I bet the EMH could do it--but not the Kazon; they've got a Klingon 'suck it up and walk it off' approach to medicine. No, I'm half-Bajoran." 

"Ah. One of the 'war orphans', then?"

"Right. I have no idea who my father was--if I'd stayed in the Alpha Quadrant longer, I might have found out from DNA matching, but I hadn't gotten to that level in the Order yet--and not too sure about my mother, although there's one lady who took care of me that was probably about the right age. My memories of my early years are spotty, even though I'm half-Cardassian. In fact, to be honest, I'm not sure that it was my father who was Cardassian and my mother Bajoran, although that's the usual pattern. I remember a number of people who were nominally my guardians; some of them were nice and some of them were abusive and many of them barely paid attention to me. When I was about eight or so, I hit the streets.

"It wasn't easy being out there. Even in the larger cities, where people were generally better-fed, they didn't throw a lot of food out, and there was serious competition for scrounging in the trash outside the better restaurants and bigger houses. Sometimes it was a matter of going out to the dumps, which had all sorts of vermin in them, not just Cardassian voles. Sometimes I begged, but even when I got money, it was hard not to get it stolen from me by other street kids or gangs. Sometimes I stole food. I got by. I got very good at hiding, which served me well in later years. I remember hiding from a kid gang once, all Bajoran boys, and listening to them looking for me. They said that one of the younger kids hadn't earned his place in the gang yet by killing a Cardassian. The kid said that I wasn't a full-blooded Cardassian, and one of the older boys said, "Well, then, you'll have to kill two," and they laughed. They also suggested that they could "have some fun" with me before I died, but I wasn't sure what they were talking about. At least, not yet.

"Not that long after, I heard from one of the other street kids that there was a place that would take you in if you weren't really ill or in trouble with the police already. I was neither, and although I didn't really trust anyone who slept under a roof, I figured that I could hit them up for a meal and see what the deal was and skate out of there if it was some sort of con or something. I went over there and knocked on the door. This lady answered it, asked me some questions--many of which I didn't have the answer to, such as who my parents were--and took me into the kitchen and fed me. She kept well away from me, and I thought that she was just trying not to scare me, until she asked me if I wanted a bath. I didn't know what that was, so she took me into the bathroom and scrubbed me down, then put me in a hand-me-down frock. I was halfway through my second meal when a man walked in the room, and without looking the least little bit surprised that a half-Cardassian girl was in his kitchen in a borrowed dress, asked me what my name was. I responded with the name that some of the street kids had given me a while ago; the woman gasped, and the man raised his eyebrows and said that they'd come up with something else to call me. I found out later that my 'name' was Bajoran slang for a certain body part that had become infected. The man's name was Mard Jarek, and--"

"What was the name they gave you?"

Seska frowned at B'Elanna. "What does it matter? I haven't answered to it in years." She looked away for a few seconds, then continued. "Mard was one of the heroes of the Occupation, because of his work caring for orphaned and abandoned children. He came from old money, from a family that had belonged to the mercantile djarra before the Occupation, and there were occasionally rumors that he'd collaborated with the Cardassians or bribed them to let him operate the shelter, but most people considered him a saint of sorts. He let me finish eating, then tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear and said that I'd probably do well here, if I wanted to stay. I had a hard time of things at first--lots of the other kids, at least the full-Bajoran ones, would glare at me and whisper behind my back, and I had difficulty falling asleep in a real bed for a while--but I did do well, and even had a growth spurt once I started eating regularly. I also did well in school; I didn't realize that I was a smart kid, but I've been able to read for as long as I remember, even though I'd never gone to a single class as far as I knew. I was starting to become something like a normal kid.

"That ended when I went through puberty. The event itself wasn't a big deal, and one of the female staffers told me about the basics. Then, she started to talk about something else--something that she didn't seem to want to talk about--but one of the other staffers interrupted her and said that that wasn't really necessary, as she gave me a look that I couldn't interpret. A few days later, Mard called me up to his office. It wasn't a big deal, as he would often do so to have a chat with a random kid, ask them how they were doing or offer to tutor them in a subject that they were struggling with. I'd been in his office before.

"He let me in, and when the door shut behind me, he locked it. He'd never done that before, at least when I was in the office. The old me, the street kid, would never have let someone shut them inside a room like that, but I'd been lulled into a sense of security by the good food, clean clothes, soft bed, and the man who always made sure that my hair was in place when I went to school. I didn't even know that the door had a lock. I also didn't know that he'd had his office soundproofed.

"I was in there for about two hours. I think." Seska paused again, for much longer, but B'Elanna couldn't say anything. Finally, Seska continued. "To tell you the truth, I don't remember that much of it. After a while, it seemed like it was happening to someone else, and then like it was a bad dream that I couldn't wake up from. I don't even remember getting into bed, later, or being put there, whatever. I woke up the next morning and, for a little while, I did think that it was a really bad dream. There weren't any marks on me when I bathed, and so I got dressed and ate breakfast. When I went out the front door, though, I was seized by a surge of panic; I was suddenly convinced that everyone would be able to tell what had happened to me, that it was going to be visible on my face somehow. I turned around to go back inside; maybe I could claim to be sick. Then I caught a glimpse of Mard through his study window, looking out at me. His face was not kind.

"So, I went to school, and nobody knew, or seemed to know. Nobody seemed to know at the orphanage, either, although the staff member who had started to tell me something seemed unable to meet my eye. Mard was polite, but distant. I was sort of glad for that. I don't know what I would have done if he had touched me again, anywhere. Screamed, probably. Or just run away. 

"If it seems unlikely that I wouldn't have at least tried to tell anyone, remember that this was the Occupation. Most Cardassians would look at me with a combination of pity and disgust. Mard's study was lined with awards and commendations that he'd received; who would believe me over him? Besides, lots of the kids had problems, some of them were about yea close to crazy. The other kids, they'd wet their bed or talk in their sleep, try to steal what few possessions you had, make up absurd stories about their parents in the Resistance or in the Federation, swing wildly between mania and depression. As long as you didn't make too much trouble, no one really cared what you did. If you did make too much trouble, you'd be gone one day and the rumors would start that you'd been sent to the labor camps. Nobody wanted to go to the labor camps, including me. People didn't come back from them. Keep your head down, don't make a fuss, and don't make waves. Go along to get along." 

B'Elanna was starting to feel queasy, not only from the specifics of Seska's story but also from long-buried memories surfacing of her sitting in a principal's outer office, blood--not all of it hers--on her face and knuckles, and her mother's rising voice coming through the walls.

"So, for a while, I put up a decent front. I didn't want to go back on the streets, although I probably would have if he'd come after me again. But then things started to, well, slip. Nothing dramatic, but I'd just go into a fugue state. Some of my teachers and social workers would say that I was just a dreamy teenager, but then I'd lose track of time more often and for longer periods. My teachers would notice that I'd been staring out the window for the entire class, and when called upon I sometimes didn't even know what subject we were discussing, let alone be able to answer. And I couldn't tell you what I was thinking about; I probably couldn't even have said what the weather was like outside. 

"One day, at recess, I found a piece of metal on the school grounds. I wasn't sure what it was, although I suspect that it may have been shrapnel from a bomb that the Resistance had set off some years before a few blocks away--some of the kids, who were there at the time, said that it was the loudest noise they'd ever heard. It was triangular, about three inches long, with a sharp point and edge along one side, and slightly curved. Now that I think about it, if you held it a certain way, it would almost look like the Starfleet symbol." She smiled. "I hid it in my clothes, and wrapped some string around the base to get a decent grip on it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with it, until one day when I was in the school bathroom, trying to fight off the waves of anxiety that would occasionally come out of nowhere. I could feel thoughts and memories that I didn't want to have swimming beneath the surface of my consciousness, like aquatic predators lurking beneath a thin layer of ice. I took my little bit of scrap metal out, wishing that I had something to stab to kill the feelings that I couldn't control. I pressed the point against the inside of my arm, and watched while a bright bead of blood grew there. I drew the point down my arm and felt an almost overwhelming surge of relief. I blotted up the blood with some bathroom tissue, wrapped more around my arm, then pulled my sleeve down and went back to class. 

"I did that a lot." Seska started to roll up her sleeves; B'Elanna, horrified, couldn't look away. Then Seska held up her arms and B'Elanna stared at the unmarked flesh on the inside of her forearms. "The Obsidian Order doesn't like identifying marks on its agents; at least, not the original ones." She rolled her sleeves back down. "The scars used to look like ladders all the way from the wrists to the elbows, though.

"As long as the cuts weren't visible, there really wasn't a problem. If I'd had a real medical exam, there might have been, but our doctor was overworked and didn't want to bother as long as there wasn't an obvious, serious problem. Then, one day, there was. I tried to pull off my facial ridges." 

"You... you tried--"

"Yeah, that's pretty much all the way into Crazytown, isn't it? All I can say is that I was at school, again, looking into the mirror. Looking at my ridges. There weren't any Cardassians around to tell me what they really were, and I started wondering if they were like the calluses that you can get on your hands, just thicker layers of skin. I looked at them until they were all that I could really see on my face, as if they were just sort of floating on top of the skin. I knew that you could pick off a callus if you were patient and careful enough, so I tried it." She looked at her hands. "But I didn't really stop when I started bleeding from the first place I tried." B'Elanna caught herself rubbing her own forehead without intending to.

"The doctor practically screamed at me as she used the dermal regenerator to heal up the wounds. The regenerator was on its last legs, but they weren't going to let a half-Cardie walk around with scabs all over her face. The doctor was probably upset because she knew that this was the sort of thing that got a kid packed off to the labor camps. Me, I didn't much care. I had my little metal blade to take care of myself for good if things got too awful, and I was tired of all the poison that kept coming to the surface of my mind, no matter how often I tried to let it out through my arms.

"I got sent to the special office way off in the far corner of the school, the one with its own outside door. The rumor was that kids who got sent there went straight out the door and into a transport to the camps. I still didn't care; I'd reached that point where even the threat of the camps didn't faze me. Besides, I'd been in Mard's office, and survived. The school disciplinarian didn't even come into the office with me, just shoved me through the door and shut it after me.

"Nothing in my life up to then could have prepared me for what I saw when I went inside. There was a man sitting at a desk, with a chair in front of it. He was middle-aged, paunchy, with a kind look on his worn face, dressed neatly but plainly. He was also the first full-blooded Cardassian that I'd been alone with in my entire life. He didn't greet me formally or even get up from his seat. I looked around, expecting to see armed guards--no Cardassian traveled in our part of the city alone--but there were none. I looked at the door that I'd just come through and saw that there was no lock on it, at least not an obvious one.

"'It's not locked.' I nearly jumped at the sound of his voice. 'You can leave any time you like.' I looked back at him, and he hadn't moved; his hands were neatly folded in front of him. 'You do need to understand something, though; if you do leave before you're dismissed, you'll never see me again. You don't understand this now, but that would be a bad thing. You can go on with your life, such as it is, but things aren't going very well for you right now, are they? You're drowning, and I'm your lifeline.'

"'What do you want?', I asked.

"'Just to talk.' He gestured at the chair. I went over to it, hesitated, then pulled it a few feet further away from him, and closer to the door, and sat down. He had no visible reaction to that. 'Do you know why I'm here?'

"I said nothing in return. He smiled, a small and sad smile. 'Good. Good. I approve. Don't give anything away if you don't have to; draw people out with your silence. It's a good technique. If there's one thing that is seriously underappreciated in my line of work, it's patience. Its value is hugely underestimated. It's saved my life more times than I can count.'

"'What do you do?'

"'I get answers. I specialize in answers to difficult questions. Questions such as, why would a schoolgirl try to rip her own ridges off? Did someone hurt her? Did someone put the thought in her head that she deserved to be hurt because she was part Cardassian? And who is that person who hurt her? Is it someone who thinks that he will get away with it? Because he's an important man? Because everyone would believe him instead of the little girl?' His facial expression was no longer kind; he was looking out the window. Then he looked at me. 'What would such a man deserve?'

"He didn't know the panic that was rising inside of me, or so I thought. I tried to jump out of my chair; I don't know if I meant to go out the door I came in, or out the other one, or attack him, or what. I stumbled over my own feet and went down, on the verge of tears. Before I could realize what he was doing, he was out of his own seat, rushing over to me with a speed and grace that belied his age and bulk. He helped me up and righted the chair, then went back to his own and sat down as if nothing had happened. He waited until I took my own seat again before he resumed talking.

"'We don't need the answers to these questions right away. But here's something that you should know. Lots of Bajorans, maybe most of them, believe that Cardassians are the primary source of evil in the universe, or at least on their world. I don't blame them. Many of my people have done very bad things since arriving here. But we know, you know, that Bajorans are also capable of great evil. In fact, there is no known race that is purely good. The Romulans, the Klingons, even the humans... those people who believe that they have evolved beyond bad behavior of any sort. We found that out when we started fighting them. You know, there was a Terran who lived hundreds of years ago, a painter, who founded an empire that nearly took over that world, and you know what he did? He created factories for murdering people. Not another species, his own kind. Can you imagine that? And yet the Terrans believe that their military isn't really a military. We're finding out the truth the hard way. We thought that they were weak and self-indulgent." He paused. "Some people can get away with evil because they claim it's for noble causes, and some people are just evil for no other reason than that it's what they like to do. My organization helps find that evil and exposes it and stops it. And we're willing to do what it takes to dig it up and reveal it in the light of day. No matter who it is.

"'But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'd like to talk to you some more, say, maybe twice a week or so. We don't have to just talk, though; we can play games. I'll be honest with you and admit that they're really tests, but they're probably going to be fun, and if you don't do well on them at first, we can practice until you're better. But I think that you'll do pretty well. I think that you're a lot smarter and more capable than anyone gives you credit for. And, if you do as well as I think you'll do, you'll go on to another school, and learn even more.' 

"'And I'll get to fight evil with you?'

"'Me and many other people who do the same.' Something was rising in my chest. It was an unfamiliar feeling, but one that I could remember from my first days at the orphanage: hope. I wasn't sure that I wanted it any more, but something held me where I was. 'You should probably go back to class. As long as you don't cut yourself any more, you should be fine. You know, those ridges on your face and mine, they're actually a form of armor. They're there to keep you from getting hurt.' 

"I started toward the door. 'Oh, and one more thing.' I felt the hope in my chest subside. Of course, there was one more thing, and it was probably the same thing that Mard had wanted. It was probably the same thing that most men, and some women, would demand of me from now on. I groped for my little scrap metal knife... and realized that it was gone from its hiding place.

"'I think you're looking for this.' I slowly turned around and he was holding my little blade out to me. I gawked at him. 'I took it from you when you fell out of your chair. If you come back, eventually, you'll find out how I knew that you had it, and how I took it away from you.' I didn't move a millimeter, and he chuckled. 'Again with the patience. If I were going to use it against you, I'd have already done so, and I'm holding it out to you handle first.'

"I took it from him; it was warm from his hand. 'I don't think that he'll try anything, but if he does, feel free to use this. But I'd suggest waiting until he's close enough for you to use it where it will put him down for good. In Bajorans, just as with Terrans, that would be the big blood vessels that run alongside each side of the windpipe vertically under the surface of the neck.' He indicated the lines on his own neck. 'Now, with Cardassians, the death spots are here and here.' He touched the spots where the ridges that ran alongside his jaw met the prominent neck ridges. He looked at me with his completely-serious look again. 'Now, where you're concerned, where are your vulnerable spots--the Bajoran points, the Cardassian points, both, or neither?'

"'I--I don't know.'

"'That's something else we'll teach you, in time.' He waved me out. That night, I doubt that I slept for more than one minute at a time. I lay on my cot, my little scrap metal knife clutched in my hand, wondering what the days to come would bring. For once, I didn't have nightmares, although the days to come would seem like a new kind of dream.

"And so we played games, two or three times a week. Sometimes board games, sometimes the one where he uncovered a table full of objects for a second and I had to tell him what was on the table and where. He'd show me pictures and ask me to make up a story about what was in them, or sometimes do the same thing with abstract blobs of ink. Sometimes he'd just talk, sometimes I'd talk, sometimes we'd have a regular conversation or one that he seemed to direct in circles or into seemingly pointless dead ends. Over time, the games grew more complex. The table full of random objects turned into things that you could make things out of, and he wanted to know what I'd build with them. Or the game where I had to take something apart would become one where I had to put it back together, only in a different way. It turned out that I had a knack for tech, and soon I was making things that had a specific use, or modifying them. The pictures became ones of real people, and then people that I knew. I also still went to regular classes, and I did much better in them and was regularly praised by my teachers, although I came to realize that my real education was all happening in the little room on the far side of the school. I didn't talk about what happened there; somehow, I knew that the other kids weren't getting the same education that I was. 

"I also didn't tell the people at the orphanage what I was up to. I did my chores, stayed quiet, and bided my time. Once, Mard Jarek came up to me and said that he was proud of how well I was doing in school, that my teachers all had good things to say about me. He reached out, intending to straighten my hair out in his old gesture, and I took a quick half-step back, my hand going to my pocket. His eyes narrowed, and he started to say something, but stopped himself and simply walked away. I watched him go, my hand on my little scrap metal knife, thinking about how I had been able to actually see the pulse in his neck. Later, I came back from my bath to find that my things had been gone through carefully, with everything being put back almost exactly the way that they were before. Those fools. Did they think that I wouldn't take it with me?

"And then came the day that my Cardassian friend told me that the games were over, and that the real lessons were to begin. 'You will have to leave this city,' he said as casually as if we were discussing the weather, 'and will travel to a number of different locations around the world, maybe even off-planet. You will likewise have a number of different teachers. Most of them will not be kind. You will, after all, be doing largely unkind things, necessary things. I have the utmost confidence in you, and believe that you will do quite well, but you must understand that we Cardassians believe that what does not kill you makes you stronger, and sometimes you will be very close to death indeed--in fact, you may die if you falter.'

"'I understand.'

"'Do you, now.' He paused. 'We will meet at least once more after your training is complete, to discuss your final examination. Should you survive it, of course.' He stood up. 'Do you want to return to the orphanage? We can have your things put into storage; I know that you don't have a lot.' 

"I hesitated. I thought about the one thing that I wanted to do at what had been my home for years. I didn't reach for my knife, but my mentor seemed to be able to read my body language regardless. 'Not yet,' he told me. 'Not yet. He's too powerful, has too many friends in high places. It may surprise you, or not, that we simply can't have Bajorans hauled off without reason. I mean, we can, but there are repercussions to actions such as that. They have to be set up, carefully. I vow to you that, if he's still in place after you've completed your training, you will get your chance.'

"So, I left without saying goodbye to anyone at the school or the home. I found out later that the people at the school and home were given the explanation that I'd had a sudden 'relapse' of my earlier behavior, and seriously injured myself; I was taken to an unnamed hospital and then, it was implied, to one of the camps. Instead, I was taken to a safe house across the city, and, as promised, the person there was not kind; they greeted me by slapping me across my face and dared me to quit, to run back to my school and the orphanage. I did not.

"I trained at numerous places on Bajor and elsewhere, including a local ore-processing station in orbit where the prefect of Bajor, a tall, charismatic man with a long neck, had his office; I had one terrifying meeting with him where he cast an evaluating eye over me and told me that he hoped we might become better acquainted. Most of my training was well away from the public eye, however. There was a fair amount of pain and humiliation involved, but I had already suffered much of that at a much younger age, and I endured the locked doors and the men who came after me, and in time learned to turn such things to my advantage. I learned as much or more from my failures as my successes and applied them to succeeding lessons and courses, and in time came to enjoy my instruction and the gifts that it gave me. There was even some room for pleasure, albeit of a sort that I'd hardly had any clue about beforehand. A great deal of Cardassian sexuality involves various aspects of dominance and discipline, sometimes in the oddest, most unexpected ways; the man who'd slapped me across the face, for instance, came to beg me to let him atone for his previous behavior, and I obliged, in my own way. Time and again, I had occasion to reflect on what my mentor had said about the hidden aspects of people, and somewhere along the line I heard an old Terran ballad which also dealt with this, and a line from it stuck with me: 'it is not always evil, and it is not always wrong.' 

"My lessons went on and on as my mastery of various skills and subjects grew, and I was starting to wonder if there was anything left to learn, when one day I went to sleep, and woke up with a new face. Without even looking at a calendar, I realized that more than one day had passed, and running a hand over my face, I felt smoothness where ridges had previously been. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror for a long time... and then I laughed and laughed, longer and harder than I ever had in my life. My childhood dream had finally been realized: I looked to all the world like a full-blooded Bajoran. I even had eyebrows! I flexed them experimentally, and they wriggled like dancing caterpillars, and I laughed until it hurt. Without realizing it, I had been cured of my self-loathing of my Cardassian side. I let my amusement subside, then carefully imagined my face as a full Cardassian. That, I decided, would be my goal: to someday be able to change my face to one that I wanted, and retire to Cardassia.

"I was in a small room in a boarding house, and checking my surroundings, all I seemed to have besides the clothes on my back was a data pad, and one more thing, which we'll get to later. The pad included identity documents for one Seska, a one-way ticket to the city that I had grown up in, and a job listing. My blood ran cold for a few seconds when I realized where the job was. I took the transport to the city and made my way to a familiar address. The woman who greeted me was unfamilar, but the person interviewing me for the job was quite familiar indeed. 'I'm Mard Jarek,' he said, 'welcome to...' He hesitated. 'Have we met before?'

"'I don't believe so, sir.'

"'Well. Sorry, for just a moment, you reminded me of... of someone who used to live here. But she was part Cardassian.'

"'I must say, sir, that I have always admired your willingness to take in children that other institutions would reject.' And so on, going through my rote declarations of respect and eagerness to help the downtrodden, all the incidental personal details that I had invented during my trip to the city, and so on, all the time closely studying the subject of my worst nightmares with newly-trained eyes. He still had a little bit of that natural charisma, but I was shocked at how much he had aged since I'd seen him last--or had he not been that young before, had I really been away that long? He seemed not just older but physically diminished, prone to sentimental reminiscences, almost deferential toward me and the other staff, as if he had already started on the road to retirement. And he no longer seemed to have that easy confidence regarding the children, wondering out loud if he was doing the best that he could for them. I felt sharp resentment mingling with disappointment and--was that actually pity, for him? That the monster who had haunted me seemed to have lost his fangs and claws? I tamped down my instinctive reactions. If there's one overarching principle that the Obsidian Order teaches you, it's to rid yourself of excessive sentimentality, even while sometimes pretending to feel the same. Whether or not he ever felt remorse for what he did to me, I had a job to do, even if it wasn't immediately apparent what all of it would entail. 

"I easily got the job, of course; my cover identity and story passed muster, aided no doubt by my own experiences giving my expressions of empathy for the children real legitimacy. The job paid very little, but that was supplemented by free room and board and even some clothing donations for the staff as well as the children. Many of my fellow staff members seemed to have more good intentions than relevant skills, so I soon found myself taking on responsibilities well in excess of my formal job description, which suited me just fine. The orphanage's financial status had declined in recent years; Resistance attacks against the occupiers had stepped up, and the Cardassians had cut their support for social programs, plus the continuing economic sanctions had lessened Bajoran donations as well. However, I started to network with others in the community and drew in some help that way, aided by the occasional anonymous donation, which could have come from some guilt-stricken father of abandoned children... although the timing of some of the gifts seemed suspicious, and made me wonder if I didn't have a hidden benefactor of my own.

"The work continued, and I became more comfortable in my role, although I was starting to wonder what the real purpose of my posting was. Mard had become almost superfluous to the operation of the orphanage, and I wondered what the point of my killing him would be, if I even chose to do so--wasn't there room for forgiveness, after all this time? Was the real point here to see if I was capable of letting go of my own anger and grief? Yet again, I counseled myself to be patient. 

"I was discussing some minor funding issue with Mard when we were interrupted by a half-Cardassian girl who'd came in a couple of months earlier, not long after I'd been hired. I'd say that she reminded me of me, but she really didn't; she was a simple girl but rather sweet, and had been dropped off there by a couple who couldn't afford to keep her any longer, so she'd been spared the depredations of the streets. She had a minor complaint, but Mard listened, and at one point reached out to smooth a stray lock of her hair into place. Suddenly, I found it difficult to breathe, and my vision narrowed to a tunnel focused on his hand in her hair. I looked at my data pad while Mard reassured her and she left. 'Seska?' I put my best neutral face on and turned to Mard. 'Is there something wrong?'

"I stammered out something vague. He looked sympathetic. 'You don't need to make excuses.' He patted me on the hand and I repressed an urge to scream. 'Lots of the new staff have the best of intentions, but they find it difficult in practice to care for Cardassians. I believe that, once you get to know the children as I have, you'll feel differently. Time heals all wounds.'

"'Indeed, sir.' Except for those of the dead, I thought to myself, and perhaps those of the dead inside.

"As I started to plan for my next move, I realized that there was no reason to delay it. I had the next day off, and thus had the opportunity to sleep in, which meant that I could take my time that night. I knew Mard's hours, his habits, how to set the lock so that he wouldn't be able to open it and then restore it to the previous settings, how to make it look as if someone had broken in to his study through the window, how to make it look as if he'd been attacked by a street thug. All I really needed from Mard was a little bit of information that may not even exist, although I strongly suspected that it did; that, and my vengeance, of course. I could rationalize holding off the execution of my plan, of course; even if there was no particular reason to, haste was never the best option. 

"But the way that he brushed back her hair, that gesture of affection that would seem random to most people if they hadn't been in his study when he locked it from the inside. That look in her eyes, of someone who hadn't yet gotten to the stage where they methodically tried to claw the ridges off their own face.

"He entered his study, maybe to check his personal mail one last time before turning in for the night, although I would soon find out that those late night office sessions sometimes had another purpose. He walked past me and didn't see me next to the door; he usually called out 'Lights' when he was already well within the room. He did so, and didn't notice me until I locked the door. He turned around and frowned. 'Seska?'

"I smiled. 'Not really.' I activated the small viewscreen behind his desk, the one that usually displayed a rotating selection of photographs taken before the Occupation. Now, it showed a picture of a half-Cardassian girl, not the one sleeping in another part of the building, but the one I had been. I'd seen the picture that had been taken when I first arrived, and this was a later picture, one that had been taken after what Mard had done to me, and it's true what other survivors had said: you can always tell when it's happened from the pictures. You can tell from the look in the eyes.

"He looked from me back to the picture, and his eyes widened. But we hadn't gotten to the coup de grace yet. I took out my knife. It's the same one that you no doubt found on my person when I surrendered to Janeway, that clever little blade. At one point during my Order training, my little scrap of metal disappeared, and I knew better than to ask for it. I was undergoing an exercise in which I had to fight desperately for my life with only my natural weapons, my teeth and nails, and couldn't have as much as a pebble for a weapon. I could have asked for it back, but I'd already learned the lesson about getting too attached to people, places or things, and after a while I assumed that they'd forgotten about it, although I hadn't, and still felt a distant ache when I remembered it. However, when I woke up with my Bajoran face, it was laying next to the pad, although not unaltered. In fact, it looked like a proper knife, albeit very small, and with a decent thumb grip. I later verified through some surreptitious scanning with replicator sensors that it was Bajoran metal alloyed with Cardassian ores; I couldn't say for sure that it was from my little improvised knife, but I preferred to believe so. It was sharp enough for a Bajoran man to shave with. Knives that short aren't really practical for close-hand fighting, as they make shallow cuts, but that's assuming a roughly equivalent opponent, and Mard was anything but that. Besides, I had plenty of time, and I used it well. And, of course, the study was still sound-proofed.

"I was woken late the next morning, as I'd planned. I'd slept like the dead, after completing my tasks in the study, and the other staff knew that I liked to sleep late when I could. You might be surprised that I could sleep, but that kind of interrogation is surprisingly exhausting for the interrogator. They didn't miss Mard, at first--sometimes he liked to go for long walks in the morning. But they worried when he didn't reappear, and found his study door locked, and they couldn't get in, and he didn't answer his personal comm. I couldn't get into the study either--well, I could, but no need for them to know that--and eventually we got a member of the local constabulary to break the door down. I screamed along with the rest of the staff at the mess that I'd left, and shed tears, as well, although mine were for a different reason: my long-delayed and long-dreamed-of vengeance hadn't, in the end, been much of a much. Really, the best part of it had been the look in his eyes when he saw my little knife. After that, well, it was really just work, and the satisfactions of his agony and desperation had quickly dwindled, even when I discovered what I discovered and any lingering doubts about my gruesome task vanished. I quickly recovered from my 'grief' and assisted the staff with attending to the children while the constables did what they had to with the body and the crime scene. 

"It took me a while to get away, as it was assumed by the staff that I'd take over as interim director of the orphanage, but finally I managed to send a signal to my contact, and the answer was not long in coming: I was to meet with another agent at the school, in the room where I had played games with my mentor. This time, I was to use the outside door, and not to call attention to my visit.

"I was not terribly surprised that the agent was my old mentor, and that he seemed to be rather better preserved than Mard despite the intervening years. He greeted me politely but without any particular affection, and received my report matter-of-factly. There was a lot to report. It turned out that Mard had recorded his... sessions, including the one with me. He shared the results with a local network of men with similar inclinations, including other caretakers of children, donors, a vedek, and even a few Cardassians. Occasionally, he shared children with them. If I had revealed this material to the world, Mard's reputation would put him in the lists of the most evil Bajorans in history. It would also reveal my own rape to the world, including to my colleagues in the Obsidian Order. It might have been worth it. But that's a moot point; I gave it instead to my mentor, to do with as he would.

"He briefly reviewed the files; if he saw the one with me during his perusal, he gave no indication. He set the pad down. 'This is pretty powerful stuff. The amount of damage that we could do with this, the amount of leverage it gives us...' He looked at me closely. 'You do realize, don't you, that the outcome of this isn't necessarily to punish all of these other abusers, at least not right away? Even though they deserve it very, very much?'

"'I'm well aware of how the Order treats information such as this. I was paying attention during my training. And, I may as well tell you, I had mapped out a way to make it look as if he had a dead man's switch on the files to delete them. He probably would have had such a function anyway, if he hadn't started to slip in recent years.' 

"'Mmm, indeed.' He glanced at the padd again, then back at me. 'Well, what do you want, then?'

"'Me? I don't want anything. I got my revenge, for what good it did me. In fact, I have you to thank for that.' I stepped toward the desk. 'And I'm willing to express my thanks, in any way that you'd like.' I put my hand near my throat. I was wearing a dress that we'd had donated to us by a local lady of the evening; it was outwardly modest, but undoing the clasp at the neck would cause the entire dress to drop to the floor. 

"He looked at me for the longest time, then shook his head. I dropped my hand. 'I'm flattered, honestly, but even if I were so inclined, at my age it's more about the offer being made than the act itself, I'm afraid. Besides, I well remember that scared little girl who came into this room. Tell you the truth, I almost went right over to that orphanage to take care of Mard myself. Maybe I should have, because of the girls he molested after you left. But he may have been more cautious back then; he may have had a dead man's switch at that point. You certainly don't owe me or the Order a thing, although we'll want to continue to use you in field work for some time. It will be especially important, if what we suspect about the Federation taking Bajor's side comes to pass. Hope you don't mind having eyebrows for a while. You'll make good use of your more seductive abilites, I'm sure.'

"I smiled. 'I think it was you that taught me than anything is a weapon if you hold it right.'

"'Indeed. But I will do this one thing, though.' He touched the pad. 'No one needs to see what happened to you; there's more than enough here, without it.'

"There's not a lot more to my story than that. You can probably guess the rest of it: blah blah liberation of Cardassia, blah blah enlistment in the tech branch of the militia, blah blah went over to the Maquis." 

B'Elanna's head was swimming with the details and the sheer emotional impact of Seska's story. Eventually, she recovered enough to ask, "There's one thing that I've been wondering about, though. When you were with us--I mean, the Maquis--why didn't you just drop the hammer on us when you could? You were with the Val Jean long enough to call in the Cardassians on us. We shouldn't have lasted nearly long enough to get yanked here by the Caretaker. Why did you let us go on?"

Seska sighed. "You're not going to like this, I have to warn you. Truth is, the Order wants the Maquis to exist."

B'Elanna just gaped at her, too dumbfounded to speak. Seska laughed. "Think about it, Torres. The Cardassians have signed a peace treaty with the Federation. They've evacuated from Bajor. The whole rationale for the Central Command taking charge of the government was that Cardassia had to be strong enough to resist all these potential enemies coming at us from every direction. We had to loot Bajor's mineral wealth, we had to keep the Federation from taking our subject planets under their wing, et cetera. And now that's all moot. The Central Command needed another plausible menace to distract the population away from maybe trying to restore the Detapa Council to power. And so the Maquis get a lot of what might seem like awfully lucky breaks." 

B'Elanna got up and started pacing around. "And do you think that you're going to go back to the Order when we get back to the Alpha Quadrant? Do you think that we'd let you?"

"If we get back to the Alpha Quadrant before we're all too old to do anything. Who knows, we might not get back at all. Or that Gamma Quadrant empire, the Dominion, might be in charge. I'm pretty sure we're going to go through Borg space at some point, and they're the only residents of the Delta Quadrant that have ever made it to the AQ that we know of. The trajector was a bust, and Janeway destroyed the only other known way of getting back. Yeah, if we find some sort of magic carpet or a wormhole that actually works or whatever, things might be a bit awkward. On the other hand, the Detapa Council might just pull it off and you'd be a hero to the Cardassians for bringing their native daughter home. There might not be an Obsidian Order left when we get back, for that matter."

"Oh, come on. Do you think they'd just all quit their jobs and get new ones as schoolteachers or poets or tailors or something?"

"Actually, there was something big coming down the pike the last time I talked to my contact. Lots of agents were being pulled out of the field. I don't know what it was about--no one was going to brief me while I was aboard a Maquis ship--but I think that it might have had something to do with the Dominion. My contact said something about maybe leaving me in place in case everything went south. The Order doesn't typically engage in large-scale operations; I can't imagine what else it could have been. At any rate, I'm effectively not in the Order if there's no way of contacting my superiors. If we do ever re-establish communication with the AQ, you may need to rethink that."

B'Elanna stood up. "Well, I've got a lot to think about before I make my recommendation to Janeway--"

"Not Chakotay, as well?"

B'Elanna snorted. "He recused himself. Just as well for you."

Seska actually looked regretful. "Look, I know that I probably hurt him a lot, especially with some of the things that I said while I was with the Kazon, but... look, it wasn't all bad, right? I mean, it wasn't all about my real job..."

"I doubt he'll buy that, but like I said, he's not going to influence Janeway's decision anyway." 

Now Seska stood up. "Look, B'Elanna, there's one last thing that I have to say." She hesitated, then went on. "All the things I told you... well, first of all, I don't want most of that getting around."

B'Elanna actually seemed angry at this. "I'm not some gossip, Seska."

"I didn't think so. But there's something else I need to say to you about that stuff."

"'It was all a lie, ha ha'?"

"I don't think it was."

B'Elanna stared. "What do you mean, you don't think it was?"

"Well, the thing about the Obsidian Order is that it operates according to a strict cell structure, and keeps a lot of secrets even from its senior operatives. And one of the best ways to keep secrets is memory implantation."

"They can do that?"

"I'm pretty sure, yeah. I've thought a lot about why the Order picked me, aside from me being pretty smart. I think that one of the reasons why is that I had proved myself capable of simply blocking out memories that were hurtful. It could be that I'm just really susceptible to post-hypnotic suggestion, and therefore, I'm not sure if any of the things that I remember really happened, or happened the way I remember them. If they did possess that technology, I wouldn't have put it past them to implant false memories to compel me to do certain things."

"Why are you even telling me this?" 

Seska looked down, then back up. "Because I'd like to think that no matter what I've done, no matter who I am or who I think I am, I'm a decent person under it all." She looked at B'Elanna. "Or maybe that's a creation of theirs, as well. Maybe it's like a Terran onion, where you can keep peeling away layers for what seems like forever, but you never quite reach the center." 

B'Elanna left. She called Janeway and told her that she had a lot to thing about. The captain told her to take her time, but to not wait too long to make her recommendation. She went to the galley and got a cup of coffee, and sat looking out at the stars. She had to admit that, if it really was a fake story, it was very finely crafted; she could relate to more of it than she'd ever admit. 

Finally, she called the captain. "I'll make a more detailed report, but I think that we should let her out and put her back on the crew, on a probationary status, of course." 

"A lot of the crew won't like that, including my first officer."

"Ma'am, I'm not sure if I like it, but it is what it is."

"Thank you, Lieutenant." 

B'Elanna finished her coffee, then walked back to the brig, playing with the small, clever knife that she'd had in her pocket.


End file.
